


like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot

by duchamp



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 17:18:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12730899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchamp/pseuds/duchamp
Summary: Don’t go where I can’t follow.That’s the party line, the token sentiment, the declaration.





	like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jonahsimms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonahsimms/gifts).



 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,  
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

ELINOR WYLIE

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a child dancing in the reflection gleaming off the water; black with white highlights as the limited light trips over itself, in the skeletal ruins of an ancient beast. There’s a little girl taught to make herself sharp as an arrowhead, forceful as any reckoning from a rendition of the Vulgate or King James. There’s a woman who’s emancipated herself from her masters.

And there’s the boy she wrestles with, who meets her, parries back and forth and back again. One who hears—her breath, hitching and easing and rising and falling; her feet, thumping resilient on a downbeat towards the ground then an up; and as she moves, wet tendrils of her hair slapping her back. There’s the man who held a horde of dying embers in his lap, who won’t do it again.

( _Come get me_ , is the implied challenge.

_Now_ , _forever_ , is the answer.)

 

 

 

“You’re really going to make me wait?” The cadence of the voice is unamused, a little rebuffed, an inch of menace present, too—Elektra’s putting on a show. She knows the braille beneath his fingertips will be abandoned right after they do the obligatory song and dance.

Matt tilts his chin up in her direction, casual, teasing. (As if anything could call for his attention louder than her—the steady, distinct heartbeat in her chest reaching out, the way he detects the curl in her smile.) “But case law beckons,” he offers, and waits for her counter.

 

 

 

He’s barely past his degree, barely past ramen and bounced checks and student loans, and he wants to marry her.

 

 

 

Lungs, failing. All systems, hardly functioning. Attempting to bring life into herself, she inhales.

He can feel the grate of the cold against her bones, her throat. Her mouth is dry and he’s pleading with her not to talk.

She dies seconds later. 

 

 

 

Three months in, and she breaks her ankle.

California’s dunes are glorious in the spring, miracles displaced out of time. The smell of the soil, of the trees, foliage, and ferns… everything. Traversing a graveled edge—he should have sensed it, predicted it; he’d chastise himself, later—she slips and is unable to catch her balance.

“Elektra!” Her name on the wind, perfumed scent (Givenchy; Organza.) traveling further, further. She lands twelve feet down on a stretched patch of turf, hard on her back. She’s still conscious; Matt knows thanks to her knuckles creaking, moving in, forming a fist, by her rapid blinks like Morse code. When he reaches her, she’s already making to sit. “Don’t move,” he blurts, instructs on a fearful note, coming across unhinged.

“I appreciate the gesture, Matthew,” she grits out, words still polished despite the pain, still calm. “But I’m fine.”

She sets the joint herself.

 

 

 

She’s ink-jet black, she’s red-hewn and brutal.

She’s far away.

She’s close.

And he’d rather die here, in her arms, with her in his, ready to take forty stories of building on his back than face a world—again—where she’s not there. _Don’t go where I can’t follow_. That’s the party line, the token sentiment, the declaration. (The one, undeniable truth in ten years spent apart, circling orbits. Spinning tops waiting to come crashing back together—but he’d really thought he’d moved on, hadn’t he, he really thought he’d managed, and now it’s almost _funny_ ; it was never that he’d fallen out of love with her, it was that he loved her too much.)

 

 

 

He’s harsh with her. He’s a sword and she’s the sandstone and her dropping in like this, with Karen’s taste still in his mouth and the phantom touch of her hair against his cheek, sharpens his resolve.

He won’t regress back.

He won’t.

 

 

 

She’s the only one who calls him ‘Matthew.’ A gesture of adoration, an unspoken claim. There since the beginning, still falling off her tongue. And, no matter the circumstance, no matter the baggage, he still aches to hear the sound.

It means, ‘You’re known.’

It means, ‘Beloved.’

 

 

 

“Birthday?” He asks. He’s hedging his bets. Instances with Elektra elaborating on her private familial life before him are next to nil.   

Tensing, slight, beside him; but he knows all her tells. “Pick a day,” she eventually says, brokering peace.

 

 

 

Heartbeat no longer present, taken, obliterated, _stolen_. It’s a tempo he set his life by. And now it’s gone. It’s unnatural, it’s wrong, it’s a blasphemous chorus in the way she moves. Only Christ rose on the third day. Like Nobu and the others, she shouldn’t be here.

She shouldn’t be—

And yet he’s grateful.

 

 

 

Stick captive, tied, double-knotted to the chair in the next room, the Hand gathering their forces en masse, they fall together on his bed. Not… they don’t. But he twines around her where they lay on their sides. Places his hands firmly against her middle, pulls her to his chest. They might as well be traveling back to the past, to his dorm room at Columbia. It’s that ingrained, that welcome.

“It will not be like this again,” she says. _We’re going to die_ , is what she doesn’t say.

He puts his lips to her neck, to the dry notch of spine at the base. “Try to sleep,” he tells her. “You’ll need your strength. We both will.”

“All the better to march to the slaughter.” Her voice is a bitter pill. Matt’s never heard it sound so pointed.

 

 

 

There’s a moment he goes back to;

Leaving the public library on a cold day in January. Elektra wearing a scarf wound around her neck, reed thin against black cashmere. Walking ahead of him in that fluid way of hers. Him calling, “Sweetheart.”

He can’t remember why he was motioning her back, when he thinks on it. He could’ve just wanted her to wait for him—wait for him to catch up. To take her hand.

She was always too far ahead.

 

 

 

He’s told of the Black Sky consistently. Heralded pageantry and a violated grave site and this he cannot forgive. It’s a sin, yes, but he won’t excuse those who’ve formed her. He’ll drag her back. Violence has always signaled a rebirth when it comes to them. Maybe it can cleanse as well.

He loves her.

Prophecy has no place here.


End file.
